Review: Israel in Egypt an all-star event at Early Music Fest in Vancouver

Israel In Egypt, the Early Music Festival’s concert centrepiece, will be performed Wednesday, Aug. 11, at the Chan Centre.

Photograph by: Jan Gates

Israel In Egypt

Aug. 11 | Chan Centre

Thanks to the prestige, enthusiasm, and expertise of Early Music Vancouver, audiences at the Chan Centre have come to expect summertime productions of major works from the Baroque era. This year, Handel’s oratorio Israel In Egypt, Early Music Festival’s concert centrepiece, was a dramatic tour de force based on the Book of Exodus.

Arguably the work of Handel receives disproportionate emphasis in our post-colonial music culture; yet a chance to hear Israel in Egypt is an event of significance.

The core of this project was an all-star super-choir drawn from a lavish pool of soloists (who sang smallish vignettes during the course of the extravaganza, which ran almost three hours), bolstered by another dozen or so hand-picked professional singers.

The results were telling. Here was a vocal ensemble of striking ability and musical sophistication. Add the players of the Pacific Baroque Orchestra, augmented with fine authentic wind, brass, and percussion players, and the preconditions for great music were in place.

The work is structured in three longish segments that proceed from mourning through drama (all those plagues) to victory and rejoicing. Handel keeps the focus on the choir; smaller ensembles and virtuoso arias are kept to a minimum. Given the rich complement of “soloists,” many of whom have become predictable EMV regulars, it’s hardly to the point to single out individual moments.

Even so, tenor Charles Daniels and alto Reginald L. Mobley were particularly noteworthy: Daniels in his extraordinary florid aria The Enemy Said, and Mobley in The Land Brought Forth Frogs. Surely one of the most engagingly ridiculous things Handel ever penned.

It was the big picture that really mattered, and it was here that the considerable success of the endeavour rested. Handel doesn’t miss a trick in creating spectacular choral effects; neither did music director Alexander Weimann in bringing them to life with theatrical cunning and an all-embracing sense of joy.

As for Mr Handel, this was a production that offered an important lesson: a single inspired Israel In Egypt trumps any number of perfunctory Messiahs.

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